Part of the commercial flower shoot for Sakata at the California Spring Trials were sunflowers, the variety 'Vincent'. To get them for spring in California they were flown in from Holland, where they waited for two weeks until the show, for when I was on site to take pictures.

No, they did not look surreal and deformed, but I was excited all day as they called to me from the edge of the staging room. They were exquisite, and finally the Sakata folks stacked them in a bucket just perfectly for their moment under the lights. Only then did they became surreal; impossibly beautiful, impossible to simply click the shutter and move on to the zinnias. Though that is what I did. The day's work was much greater than the one sunflower photo. [click to continue…]